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Manon, an intense production about ill-fated love: Review

Sonia Rodriguez and Guillaume Côté of the National Ballet of Canada in Manon. (Aleksandar Antonijevic)

National Ballet of Canada. Choreography by Kenneth MacMillan. Until Nov. 16 at the Four Season Centre, 145 Queen St. W. national.ballet.ca, 416-345-9595 or 1-866-345-9595.

As three-act story ballets go, few are more drenched in sex, greed and moral corruption than Manon.

British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 dance adaptation of an early-18th-century novel about a gold-digging girl, a besotted lover and her avaricious brother is a scorcher.

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First performed here by the National Ballet in 1996, Manon has returned to launch the company’s fall season and, if the enthusiastic reaction of weekend audiences is any indication, people can’t get enough of this fallen woman and her marshmallow-hearted beau.

The ovation that greeted Sonia Rodriguez and Guillaume Côté, Saturday night’s opening leads, was spontaneous and heartfelt; as was proper. They negotiated the fiendish technical challenges of MacMillan’s choreography with almost reckless physical abandon, whipping up a blistering emotional storm.

From early in his career, in the 1950s, MacMillan had aligned himself with a vein of gritty realism then revolutionizing British theatre. Although steeped in ballet classicism, MacMillan began distorting its physical conventions with the goal of expressing raw and not always pretty passions.

By the time he tackled Manon, MacMillan knew how to please traditional opera-house audiences with the opulent outer trappings of a spectacular period costume drama while still satisfying his urge to probe the dark depths of the human psyche.

In the case of Manon, there are no heroes or heroines. The title character, ostensibly in love with Des Grieux, an ardent young student, allows herself to be pimped by her own brother, Lescaut. Des Grieux, meanwhile, is an easily manipulated milksop for whom it’s often hard to feel any great sympathy.

Ironically, for all his loathsome amorality, it’s Lescaut who projects as the most decisive and in a way engaging character. Lescaut knows precisely what he wants and goes for it. The only drawback is that he gets shot dead at the end of Act II, whereas it takes a second intermission and final act, complete with a brutal rape scene, before Manon, by now a convict transported to a penal colony, expires in the arms of Des Grieux and swamps of French imperial Louisiana.

Manon’s character can be variously interpreted. Rodriguez comes across as archly calculating from the start. She plays poor the susceptible Des Grieux with almost narcissistic egoism, revelling in her feminine allure — until life, or rather death, catches up with her.

At Sunday’s matinee, however, Jillian Vanstone offered a more innocent Manon whose naivety and weakness for the gilded life leads her down a tragic path. Her innocence is matched by that of her devoted Des Grieux, corps de ballet member Harrison James dancing a major principal role and acquitting himself splendidly. The chemistry between Vanstone and James is electric. His utter devotion seems all the more plausible given the way Vanstone projects Manon’s conflicted yearnings.

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The National Ballet is currently enduring a spate of injuries in the senior male ranks, so James is not the only corps member getting a major break.

Francesco Gabriele Frola made a show-stopping debut as Lescaut on Saturday night with dancing that combined athletic bravura — what a buoyant jump — with an easeful nonchalance entirely befitting the character. And the man can act. You’d think Frola had been dancing the role for years.

Not surprisingly, guest artist James Whiteside, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, brought blazing star power to Lescaut on Sunday afternoon, playing him as an outright villain and thus the main agent of Manon and Des Grieux’s tragic downfall.

Manon is populated with a host of supporting roles of varying dramatic importance among which the role of Lescaut’s mistress was thrillingly danced by former Bolshoi star Svetlana Lunkina. Jonathan Renna was a suitably predatory beast of a head jailor. Rex Harrington and Peter Ottmann, each in his own distinct way, gave chilling interpretations of Manon’s “protector,” the creepy rich Monsieur GM.

The ballet orchestra, under the attentive baton of music director David Briskin, played the serviceable, pasted-together Jules Massenet score, rearranged and orchestrated to advantage by Martin Yates in 2011, with energized verve.

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